Didn’t catch any grenades, but I imagine so?

I played last night and showed those young’uns how to use the gravity gun.

Hadn’t played regularly in about 15 years, but the reflexes are still there.

From Wikipedia:

In November 2024, following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 United States presidential election and Elon Musk’s nomination as a co-executive of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Bluesky experienced a surge in new user registrations as people migrated from other social platforms, particularly Twitter. Many came from the United States, United Kingdom (where Bluesky had previously seen growth during the 2024 UK riots following Musk’s commentary), and Canada. The social app added over 4 million registered users in that week, becoming the most popular app in the US App Store and Play Store.

And Republicans still pretend like these aren’t their allies.

Oh yeah, Amarillo is a big city for the NI-coC. Abilene, too.

The us-or-them situation is exactly what they’re aiming for: isolated people are easier to control. But yeah, I’m not sure if it’s an intentional strategy or just what happened to work out for their purposes.

Interesting! I wonder where they got the description from?

Well, I grew up in what is known as the non-institutional church of Christ. There are different branches of the coC, ranging from the relatively liberal to the downright draconian.

What made this particular branch of the coC “non-institutional” is that they are independent of each other congregation, so the leadership of each group is separate from every other.

The way it actually shakes out is that every congregation gets super deep into the weeds about arcane interpretations of an ancient text about which they are unqualified to explain while making overconfident proclamations of certainty. Other congregations disagree with a fairly minor point in this reading, and they will become effectively dead to each other. Ultimately, the different churches (they would hate me calling them that) would form a loose confederation across the region with various groups they could live in uneasy peace with.

Within the congregation itself was a religion that taught that the world is a wicked place from which we should set ourselves apart. Evolution was a lie spread by the devil to make us doubt God’s power. Women were not allowed to speak or wear pants during the church service. We did not use instruments to make music during the service, as that was not mentioned in the Bible. Any disagreement with doctrine could get one removed from good standing, and we left two churches (forced out, really) based on the Elders’ strict views on baptism and musical instruments: my father would not agree that immersion was strictly necessary to save one’s soul, or that it was sinful to exceed the Bible’s authority and use instruments.

It is a bit of a weird duck as a cult, but they’re extremely controlling, patriarchal, and reactionary. They’re in most towns, but people usually think they’re an offshoot of the Baptists (of which certain types also dip into cult status in my opinion). I’d place them between the Baptists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses on a fundamentalist belief scale. I think the BITE model is a useful one (but not perfect) for defining cults:

• Behavioral control
• Information control
• Thought control
• Emotional control

The coC did all of these things: they wanted members to live apart from society where only those in the church were acceptable social peers, to limit exposure with “subversive” ideas and science, to make people so afraid of going to hell that you’ll blindly accept the teachings. You were expected to attend every service: Sunday morning & night and Wednesday night.

In short, they wanted to control people’s lives by love-bombing newcomers and then suffocating them until they fit into their assigned tiny little box.

And yes, we were in the end times. Even though nobody knows when Jesus will return. Wink.

I feel equal parts pity and exasperation that they’re ignoring critical crises like global climate change to focus on superstitious nonsense.

I grew up in a cult, so my whole life.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series.

Just a breathtaking setting that begins with the first hundred settlers and traces the intrigue, terraforming, conflicts, and dreams of the colonists. It’s a sweeping epic written on a human scale.

“Our goal in a couple of years is for people to think of Infowars as the funniest and dumbest website that exists,” Ben Collins, the Onion’s CEO, told The Associated Press. “It was previously the dumbest website that exists.”

Sarmatians are different from Samaritans.

It started as a fake psychiatry scam, but when Hubbard realized there were laws regulating medicine he switched it over to being a religion where there aren’t any of those pesky regulations or ethical oversight.

Weird, they just let a psycho killer be a cop? I’m sure they’ll prevent that in the future.

You’re never too rich to enjoy a free turkey dog.

I’m a man and I’d never date a Republican either.

A person’s politics are a reflection of their values: if they’re willing to identify themselves as someone who validates all that fascist shit, then I want nothing to do with them.

It’s crazy to me that this take is even remotely controversial.

Yamaha makes the best guitar for the money.

The instrument I probably play the most is a nylon string Yamaha with a great dual pickup/mic that I got for $100 at a pawn shop. It has some cosmetic wear, but that’s a bonus in my opinion.

My very favorite system is Apocalypse World; it always plays out as high-drama operatic pulp. It does tend to go PvP in later sessions, so it’s definitely not for every group.

I also enjoy Blades in the Dark, a heist game set in a haunted Victorian London-inspired city. There are a lot of great innovations that mean the players don’t have to meticulously plan out their session (often wasting time on contingencies that are irrelevant), and instead can jump right in and get to the juicy bits.

Mothership is a great sci-fi horror OSR (old school revival) game that is very modular and has a ton of pre-written modules. Normally I prefer a more improvised style, but this is a solid ruleset that works well towards building the tension required for the genre.

If you’re just looking for a one-shot, Fiasco is always a great time: very rules light and more like a writers room exercise than most RPGs, but there’s no better game for hilarious hijinks inspired by films like Fargo or Burn After Reading.

Dogs in the Vineyard is another great one by the same designers as Apocalypse World in which the players are teenage paladin gunslingers in a weird old west populated by demons and heretics. The players come to town with absolute moral authority and may judge whomever they wish, but there’s no guarantee they’re really the good guys even though their characters absolutely see themselves that way.

DnD is a fine game.

But in my opinion, there are so many better roleplay systems.

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